As police departments and emergency call centers struggle to recruit and retain staff, government technology suppliers are trying to help, developing tools that could ease the strain on employees from a business perspective.
The ongoing staffing shortage is a major part of supplier sales pitches for 2024. Every public safety product launch seems to be about making it easier for emergency response agencies to do more rather than less.
That may well be true.
But while this trend is still in its early stages, two stories are emerging: First, given the pace of research and development, staffing shortages today will impact product deployments years from now, and Second, technology has limitations when it comes to helping agencies address job vacancies.
The staffing shortage is fuelling all sorts of discussions between technology suppliers and their existing and potential customers, and encouraging government tech deals.
This includes Versaterm's recent acquisition of Mindbase, whose health and wellness platform could help paramedics avoid burnout resulting from, for example, the stress of shift work.
For Motorola, helping reduce stress means selling software that helps 911 operators identify when they need to take a short break — a threshold that can be reached after several “stressful” calls in a row, Todd Piette, corporate vice president of command center technology at Motorola Solutions, told Government Technology.
Technology can also help speed up the recruiting and onboarding process, which can be time-consuming and an additional deterrent for talented, motivated candidates. Having access to modern tools also appeals to younger police and call-taker candidates who have grown up on digital and mobile platforms and expect to work with the latest technology.
“I think technology has a role to play in each of those areas,” Piette said.
Public safety technology suppliers such as Motorola are operating in a sector that must recover from the pandemic and tensions and bad press caused by racial unrest, including the killing of George Floyd in 2020. And as if that wasn't enough, relatively low public sector salaries aren't doing much to fill vacant police and call-response positions.
In fact, there was a roughly 40 percent increase in law enforcement retirements from 2020 to 2021, according to the Police Executive Research Forum.
The group called the latest data, released in April, “encouraging,” saying “police agencies will be hiring more officers in 2023 than in any of the past four years.” Resignations and retirements are also down. Still, staffing levels at larger police agencies, which tend to have more staffing issues than smaller ones, remain 5% lower than in 2020.
Even as police departments are re-staffing thanks to salary increases, contract bonuses, and other incentives, emergency dispatch centers are struggling to attract candidates themselves: A report from NENA and dispatch software supplier Carbyne found that 82% of call centers report being understaffed, with a “growing shortage” of younger workers to replace those who retire or leave the job due to burnout.
One technological solution to this problem is the ongoing effort to link emergency call centers to provide coordinated responses, provide real-time data and other services to make call handlers' jobs less stressful, more automated and more efficient.
For example, CentralSquare Technologies recently announced that five Oklahoma agencies, collectively serving more than 100,000 people, will soon be working together through the company's next-generation 911 software.
The technology just rolled out in the state “helps automate certain processes and save call takers time by answering wrong calls with automated text messages and sorting and routing calls using pre-recorded greetings with automatic call distribution (ACD) functionality,” Kevin Wattenburger, sales director for 911 call handling at Central Square Technologies, told Government Technology in an email.
But so far there's little evidence to show which new technologies will be most effective at alleviating staffing shortages at emergency call centers, said April Heinze, NENA's director of 911 operations.
“AI has provided some relief,” she told Government Technology.
But it's too early to draw firm judgements about the benefits of all the new technology, she said. Heinz and others at the organization say recent data shows a slight increase in call center employment.
On the police side, it's hard to nail down a single way of thinking about how new public safety technologies and AI are impacting workforce issues: police departments vary widely in size, budgets and pace of work, for example.
But the La Crosse, Wisconsin Police Department, where about 90 officers patrol this college town of more than 51,000, has a fairly common observation: The department has 10 open positions it's hoping to fill, Sergeant Brooke Pataska told Government Technology. The department is using software to speed up report generation and other operations, which has resulted in more officers being on the streets.
“Technology has made things faster and we can respond more quickly,” she said.
That includes arrest procedures, a normally time-consuming part of daily operations that the software is trying to speed up.
But like others interviewed for this article, Patasca was skeptical that even the best technology and cleverest AI models can fully solve the problems associated with a shrinking workforce.
“We can leverage AI to a certain extent,” Heinz said, “but I don’t see AI reducing the need for human interaction.”
Currently, artificial intelligence lacks the deep levels of human empathy that a non-robotic call-taker or police officer would ideally possess.
As the technology becomes more pervasive, a big concern is whether AI can truly gain empathy, a recent example of which is RapidSOS, which just released an AI tool for officers and dispatchers that includes a large-scale language model based on public safety training.
“AI can't do all of these jobs,” RapidSOS CEO Michael Martin told Government Technology. “It will never have the integrity or empathy of a 911 handler.”
That's important because good call takers and police officers have intuition that can be extremely useful in an emergency.
So what happens if technology has limitations in alleviating the pain of talent shortages?
Part of the answer is faith — specifically, the hope that young people will find meaning in a public safety career, even if the pay is relatively low.
“Gen Z is entering the workforce and seeking purpose-driven employment,” Chris Nussman, NENA's vice president of strategy, impact and communications, told Government Technology.
His group is promoting higher wages for these workers and the use of health-tracking software to prevent job burnout, which he says begins around the third year of working at a dispatch center.
Another way to address staffing woes is to think smarter about how to deploy technology, said Rob Wheeler, director of growth, operations and customer advocacy at Peregrine, a company that sells data integration and health monitoring software to police departments.
“Since most new officers start on patrol, we believe demonstrating that the department is investing in technology to keep patrol officers safe while also providing effective mentoring opportunities will go a long way in recruiting,” he told Government Technology in an email.
Whatever happens over the next year or so (general employment growth, significant improvements in AI capabilities, further declines in reported crimes, etc.), today's staffing shortages will likely be reflected in public safety technology of the near future.
“The ongoing staffing shortage significantly impacts our long-term research and development outlook,” Deborah Seingarten, vice president of marketing at Carbine, told Government Technology in an email. “As long as staffing shortages remain a significant pain point for our customers, it will remain a focus of our product roadmap.”
